Should we fear open source software? Of course not. But that hasn’t stopped federal courts from issuing bizarre warnings like this:

The court would like to make CM/ECF filers aware of certain security concerns relating to a software application or .plug-in. called RECAP … Please be aware that RECAP is “open-source” software, which can be freely obtained by anyone with Internet access and modified for benign or malicious purposes … .

To understand this strange edict, we need to review the history of RECAP and why it might be unpopular with court officials.

In the ongoing legal battle between craigslist and 3taps, a new court opinion makes clear that people are "authorized" under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to access a public website. But what the court gave with one hand it took with the other, as it also ruled that sending a cease-and-desist letter and blocking an IP address is enough to "revoke" this authorization.

3taps collects real-estate data from craigslist and makes it available to other companies to use. One of those companies, Padmapper, republished craigslist apartment postings over a map to enable users to view apartment listings geographically, a feature then unavailable on the craigslist site. Craigslist's terms of service prohibits people from "scraping" or copying data from craigslist's site.

After days of anticipation, EFF's "Encryption is Key" t-shirt for DEF CON 21 has been solved! DEF CON holds a special place in our hearts as one of the premier hacking conferences in the US, so for the past few years we have created special member t-shirts to honor the creative spirit of the infosec community. We started with "Things to Hack" at DC18, "Encryption Saves" at DC19, and our robot-pwning "Script Kitty" at DC20.

EFF is at Black Hat and DEF CON this week, two conferences that draw a wide variety of people from tech including security researchers, coders, engineers, and everyday users. This year, EFF is pushing its campaign around making common sense changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act—including a phone booth called the CFAA DC Dialer that allows DEF CON attendees to call their Representative.

In January, our friend Aaron Swartz killed himself. Aaron was unable to carry on against an overzealous government prosecution enforcing a grossly unfair and outdated law. We, and millions of others around the world, were saddened beyond words. Aaron was prosecuted for using legendary academic institution Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s open network to download articles from JSTOR, the digital library that sells scholarly articles, largely funded by public tax dollars, back to the public at something like $5-12 per article. Academic institutions like MIT, however, don't pay for each article but instead pay subscription fees that give access to everyone within their communities, including visitors like Aaron.